A Black Sea Journey: 18th Century Quiz

Answer: Russia, Turkey, and Georgia

What we learned in school to call the separate continents of Asia and Europe are actually one large land mass, Eurasia, stretching for 55,000,000 square kilometers or 21,000,000 square miles across the Northern Hemisphere (with just a bit of Asia south of the Equator). Where to draw the line (or even if we should draw a line) has more to do with politics, culture, and history than with physical geography. Looking strictly at the map, some geographers identify Europe as simply a peninsula of Asia.

While the Black Sea was at least a symbolic border for earlier civilizations, by the 18th Century, Imperial Russia was pushing deeply into Asian Siberia toward Mongolia, China, and the Pacific Ocean. Borders kept shifting among the small countries of the Caucasus, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, as Imperial Russia, Ottoman Turkey, and the Safavid Empire (now Iran) and others to the south and east competed for power in the region. Philip Johan von Strahlenberg (1676-1747) was a Swedish military engineer and geographer taken prisoner of war in 1709 at the Battle of Poltava between Russia and Sweden.

In Siberia from 1711 to 1721 von Strahlenberg observed and wrote about the peoples and lands of the northern stretch of Eurasia, proposing the Ural Mountains border between Europe and Asia that with minor changes here and there became the accepted convention. This construct places modern Turkey and Georgia partly in both continents and the enormous nation of Russia covering a large chunk of Europe and all of the northern expanse of Asia. Geographically, in the 21st Century, 3% of of the northwestern part of Turkey, including half of Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), and 10% of the population are technically on the European continent, but the vast majority of its people and lands are in Asia. The Turkish Straits mentioned in our question are the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosphorus, all three at the entrance of the Black Sea, dividing the city of Istanbul into Asian and European sections. Since we are only considering countries on the shores of the Black Sea in this question, Russia, Turkey, and Georgia are the countries that are both Asian and European for our purposes; however, Armenia and Azerbaijan are like Georgia in that the arbitrary separation of Eurasia into two different continents makes it difficult to place them in one or another. The Caucasus Mountains supposedly form the border, but the mountains are actually within the borders of those countries, which share much with the Middle East and Asia but in many ways are culturally European. That's how it is with crossroads and with trying to color inside the lines.

Answer: Ottoman Empire

In the 1700s, the major powers in the Black Sea region in Asia were Imperial Russia, Ottoman Turkey, and the Safavid Empire in Persia (what is now Iran). Because the Safavid Empire was in decline and was dealing with Afghan and Russian invasions, and its access to the Black Sea depended on getting a toehold in Georgia or southeastern Turkey around Trebizond, the story of the Black Sea in the 18th Century is primarily one of conflict between Russia and Turkey. Russia struggled to secure ports on the northern shores of the Black Sea, especially in the Sea of Azov and the Crimean Peninsula, building up a large fleet of ships and approaching the sea by way of navigable rivers. Ottoman Turkey maintained fleets of galleys to protect its domination of the Black Sea trade routes and ports primarily on the southern shores.

The Ottoman Navy controlled the straits into the Black Sea from the Mediterranean at Constantinople, which they had held since 1453. Turkey also blocked Russia from a northern approach because the ports on the Crimean Peninsula and the Kerch Strait between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea proper were in the hands of an Ottoman ally, the Crimean Khanate, and southern ports like Sinope were directly across the sea, in position to defend or attack.

By the 18th century, the Ottoman Empire was past its time of greatest power and influence and even allied with Sweden in the early part of the century, trying to contain Russia. The Crimean War of the mid 19th century is well-known, but there were three conflicts involving the Sea of Azov before then - the first from 1686 to 1700, the second in 1710 and 1711, and the third (also involving Austria) from 1735 to 1739 - with ports and territories changing hands often. Russia later concentrated on an approach by way of the Volga River to the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus region that lies in the 836 miles between the seas (now Azerbaijan and Georgia), while continuing to push from the west. A great Russian naval victory eventually came by bringing a fleet from the Baltic Sea in Europe around to the Mediterranean, and it was not in the Black Sea but in the Aegean Sea near the Greek island of Chios that the Russians destroyed the Ottoman fleet: the Battle of Chesma in 1770. At the same time, land battles in Europe took place that led to Russia's control of Crimea. While its loss of the Crimean War in the 1850s stopped Russia from taking over all of Turkey, including the straits at Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire never recovered from the total destruction of its remaining fleet by the Russian Navy at the Black Sea port of Sinope in 1853, in what is considered the last major battle in history between sailing ships.

Answer: Africa

In a biography of Abram Petrovich Gannibal called "The Stolen Prince" Hugh Barnes tackles the life and origins of the African great-grandfather of the celebrated author Alexander Pushkin. Abram (Abraham or Ibrahim) was clearly African, and was long assumed to come from a part of Ethiopia that is now in Eritrea; however, Barnes and others convincingly trace hints in his family crest (shown in our picture) and other historical clues to a location in West Africa around Lake Chad, where many slaves were captured in the 17th and 18th centuries, both for the Atlantic slave trade to the Americas and the trans-Saharan slave trade to North Africa and the Mediterranean Sea area, including Constantinople.

He seems to have adopted the surname "Gannibal" - for the Carthaginian (North African) soldier Hannibal - as an adult, reflecting his African ancestry and his chosen profession but giving no help with identifying his birthplace, which he only knew as a place called Lagone, where his father was king of three cities.

He was probably seven years old when taken to Moscow as a present for Tsar Peter the Great, who had him christened as a son (hence his name Petrovich, meaning Peter's son), took him everywhere (even into battle), had him educated to be a military engineer and canal builder, and exposed him to society with the Russian nobility as well as soldiers and workers. (Tsar Peter I was infamous for getting his hands dirty, disguising himself to work in shipyards or building sites.) In France for training in engineering (and probably as a spy), the tsar's protégé read widely and interacted as an equal with great minds of the Enlightenment like Voltaire and Diderot, then fought for the French in Spain, opening the door to further education. After Peter's death, he shifted in and out of favor and was sent for a time to Siberia and built a fortification on the border with China. When back in favor, he served in other military positions in the Baltic and near the border with Sweden and Finland. For a time, he was de facto governor of Estonia. He was fascinated with science and mathematics - writing a book called "Geometry and Fortification" - and, an experimenter in artillery and rocketry, was often the person in charge of fireworks displays. The estate granted to the former slave by the Tsarina Elizabeth, the daughter of his foster father Peter the Great, covered over 6,000 acres and included "569 souls living" (that is, serfs).

Answer: Slaves

The slaves and freed slaves called "janissaries" and "mamluks" shared similar histories: they began as boys eight years old through their teens who had been captured or bought from cultures outside the Muslim world then converted and trained to be soldiers or administrators. Because Muslim law forbids enslaving fellow Muslims, they obtained slaves from Africa south of the Sahara for some purposes and from the European shores of the Black Sea and further north and east for other purposes. Females were used for labor, entertainment, sex, and reproduction; and some became wives and mothers of men in power, exerting real political influence from harems or separate households. Males from Africa ("abd") were used for labor, as well, but some were castrated before entering Muslim territories then used as eunuchs to guard and serve in harems, households, and holy places.

The Chief Eunuch of the Sultan's harem was a man with political power and high status, third after the Sultan and his Vizier. Janissaries began as a specific subset of slaves taken through a medieval custom called "devshirme" in which the Ottoman Turks essentially taxed areas of the Balkans and other Christian or pagan borderlands by requiring a certain number of children to be sent as slaves to be trained for elite military units or for tasks within the court or the administrative bureaucracy.

While devshirme no longer operated officially in the 18th century, boys continued to be captured for such purposes well into the 19th century, often by way of the Crimean Khanate, which engaged in frequent slaving raids for profit. After receiving training in the military or his assigned field and receiving a good Muslim education, a janissary was freed but expected to continue his service. Many found ways to make money on the side and became rich, sometimes making merchants pay for "protection" or becoming tax collectors or merchants themselves. They used brutal force against the people of the towns and countryside; for example, in 1718, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu noted their cruelty to the common people, as she watched the janissaries escorting her party take food and supplies by force from peasant families, leaving them nothing. The word "mamluk" is a more general term for the same sort of slavery for which a janissary was used, applying to military or governmental slaves outside the direct control of the sultan. Many mamluks came from Georgia and other areas along the eastern shores of the Black Sea and beyond the Caucasus Mountains into the steppes, and some maintained ties with families back home, leading to interactions among Turkish and Caucasian cultures. Mamluks often came from areas with a tradition of riding on horseback, so they were used in skilled cavalry units. Unlike janissaries, who influenced and sometimes controlled the sultan and his representatives behind the scenes, mamluks had a history of openly seizing power and founding dynasties. In earlier eras, Mamluk sultans ruled in Egypt and India; throughout the 18th Century, they held power in Iraq. In Ottoman-controlled lands, mamluks often served as beys governing districts, essentially as free agents of the Empire, explaining why Napoleon encountered them in Egypt in 1798-1801.

Answer: Tobacco

Unlike opium and cannabis, also smoked in pipes like the long-handled chibouk shown in our picture or like the water-based nargiles or hookahs (water pipes) that were passed around in coffee houses and other social settings, tobacco is not native to Asia. (Frankincense, which is burned for its aroma rather than smoked, was also known in the Black Sea region from ancient times.) The initial observation of tobacco smoking recorded by Europeans comes from the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492, when crew members saw natives of a Caribbean island blowing smoke out of their mouths and nostrils using "fire brands" that turned out to be tobacco leaves wrapped in strips cut from maize plants.

Much later, the invention of cigarettes was credited to Turkish soldiers during the 1850s Crimean War (or alternatively at the Siege of Acre in 1799) who were seen using cartridge paper to hold pipe tobacco in a way that left their hands free for battle.

Historians have pointed out that cigarettes (or "papelates" as they were known at the time) are seen in paintings of soldiers by Spanish artist Francisco Goya in the 18th Century, predating the Crimean War, and the consensus is that early versions of cigarettes were smoked in France before the idea came to Turkey. Because sea-going merchants of the Italian city-state of Venice (as well as Genoa and Pisa) were the middle-men between Europe and the Black Sea ports, it is thought that they brought tobacco and other products of the Americas to Turkey. Sorting through folklore and ethnocentrism, it is clear that sailors and soldiers carried the Native American custom of tobacco smoking to Europe and Asia before 1600 and that its spread across both continents (and into North Africa) happened rapidly with much cross-cultural borrowing of customs.

It is also agreed that one of the best qualities of tobacco for cigarette blends is the sun-dried, small-leaf variety known as Oriental or Turkish tobacco, which began to be grown in the Ottoman Empire by 1700. Turkish tobacco pipes, too, continue to be admired for their quality and beauty. Shorter chibouks could be hidden in one's sleeve, and longer ones often could be broken down into pieces to carry. Pipe stems were sometimes used to smuggle secret messages. Debate about whether or not tobacco is prohibited (haram), disapproved (makrah), or allowed (halal) under Islamic law began in 1602 with the first and by no means the last fatwa (legal pronouncement) against its use by Muslims, but because the Qur'ān was written down before the use of tobacco in Muslim lands, clerical objections could not stem its popularity in the 18th Century, especially since it was believed to have medicinal properties. While tobacco came to be grown in several regions of Turkey and was first planted in Milas in the southwest, the cities near the Black Sea most known for its cultivation include Bitlis, Samsun, and Amasya. Tobacco is also grown (and avidly consumed) in other Black Sea areas like Georgia and the breakaway republic of Abkhazia, as well as in Russia. Additional information can be found in the 2006 article "Smoking and 'Early Modern' Sociability: The Great Tobacco Debate in the Ottoman Middle East (Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries)" by James Grehan from "The American Historical Review" (available online) or the books "Tobacco in History" by Jordan Goodman and "Cigarettes in Fact and Fiction" by John Bain.

Answer: A bath-house

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1698-1762) described the women in Islamic societies in a more objective and positive way than did male European writers, who were titillated by exotic "oriental" descriptions of naked women in harems and in the Turkish bath-houses called bagnios.

The word "bagnio" gathered connotations of "brothel" through these male fantasies and as "prison" because galley slaves were housed near a bagnio in Constantinople. However, the bath-house Lady Mary observed (keeping most of her clothes on) was a comfortable women's space that she saw as serving the same function as males-only coffee houses.

As a woman, Lady Mary had access to private spaces men only imagined and often misinterpreted, and she observed women, veiled and protected in public, who had personal freedom and privacy she envied as a European woman of the 1700s.

While there are several portraits of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkish dress, the image here in a painting by Frenchman Jean-Étienne Liotard is of an unidentified "Frankish lady" with a servant, both wearing high platforms on their feet to get across the wet floors of the bath-house. (Any western European person was considered to be Frankish.) The lady is also holding a long-handled pipe (a chibouk) for smoking tobacco as she gets ready to share bath time with other ladies and their servants in the bagnio.

A positive aspect for Lady Mary that shocked many Europeans was that as women bathed and chatted together in various states of undress, social classes were less obvious. She comments on the beauty of these women and their complexions, probably owing to both the steamy cleanliness of the bagnios and to inoculations against smallpox. Lady Mary had lost a brother to smallpox, had suffered and been scarred from it herself, and was quick to have her son receive protection from the full-blown disease through the technique used by female healers in Turkey, provided in social settings that resembled parties! Back in England, she influenced Queen Caroline (whose father had died of smallpox when she was three) to have the royal princes and princesses vaccinated, as well. While Edward Jenner later found a safer way by using cowpox vaccine rather than a small sample of smallpox itself, it was Lady Mary's willingness to learn from Turkish women's customs that led the way.

Answer: Georgia

Georgia was divided in the 18th century, and its unity continues to be challenged in the 21st century by "breakaway regions" like Abkhazia and South Ossetia on the border with Russia and like Adjara bordering Turkey. Except for a "Golden Age" in the 12th and 13th centuries and a few brief times since, the nation now called Georgia consisted of several small nations, often ruled by kings or queens who were related to each other but maintained separate kingdoms. In addition to smaller principalities, Georgia had three main regions that have been independent of each other at times and at other times have combined: Kartli, the central region that contains the capital city of Tbilisi, once called Tiflis; Kakheti, the eastern region that borders Azerbaijan; and the more fragmented Black Sea region in the west, called Colchis in ancient times, and Mingrelia and other names in later eras. Russia, Turkey, and Iran all exerted influence during parts of the 18th Century, forcing Georgian rulers to serve as puppet governors or even forcing them into exile. At the same time, intermarriage took place with rulers of surrounding empires throughout history, and some rulers in the Middle East were of Georgian descent because slave soldiers coming from the Caucasus region, especially Mamluks, had gained power. By the end of the 18th Century, Imperial Russia had annexed the Georgian kingdoms and incorporated their royalty into the Russian system of noble ranks.

Wine making goes so far back in Georgia that some historians believe wine was first produced there, where soil, water, and climate all contribute to the quality of grapes. Words for wine in other languages may come from the Georgian word "ghvino", and experts have identified 525 grape varieties that originated in Georgia. Vines were sometimes destroyed by Muslim invaders, and wine production was forbidden at times. Orthodox Christianity, on the other hand, encouraged individuals to keep a special stock of high quality red wine to contribute to churches and monasteries, and many families would keep a huge vat buried near their homes just for that purpose and for special occasions. It's also said that a vessel of wine would be buried on a child's day of birth and left to age until their wedding day. These vats, large enough to cover the whole bed of a wagon or (as in an early 20th Century film) a pickup truck, were called "kvevri" (also spelled "qvevri" to indicate that the softer sound of "k" is used). The oldest such vessel found is estimated to be 8,000 years old, and the continuation of the ancient wine making process led UNESCO to name it a "non-material human heritage monument" in 2013. Kvevris sometimes hold 8,000 liters (but usually 1-2 thousand liters), have pointed egg-shaped bottoms to keep them vertical when buried in the soil and to keep lees from mixing with the wine, and have flat tops with lids that can be removed at certain stages of the natural fermentation and aging process, all of which takes place in the kvevri. The kvevri is made of clay by artisans and lined with beeswax, and when emptied it is cleaned in natural ways using limestone or ashes. The commemorative stamp in our photograph identifies Georgia as the "Cradle of Wine" and shows a buried kvevri alongside a skeleton, recalling archaeological evidence of ancient wine making. The bronze human figure holding a drinking horn represents a Tamada, or toast master, the person in a gathering with the greatest gift of eloquence and knowledge of folklore, who leads joyful, traditional ceremonies surrounding food and drink.

Answer: The Great Tea Road

The Siberian Highway, sometimes called the Great Tea Road, facilitated trade with China and other Asian regions that previously had been conducted through river navigation. Because southern routes on the old Silk Roads were dominated by the Islamic Safavid and Ottoman Empires, and Russia was just beginning to develop a navy under Peter the Great (1672-1725) and had limited sea access, this northern route across Europe and Asia was needed as an avenue for trade but also as a way to keep Siberian outposts in touch with Moscow and the new city of Saint Petersburg the Tsar was building on the Baltic Sea far to the west.

In the east, Russians traded furs, hides, leather, cloth, hardware, and livestock for Chinese silk and cotton, fruit, porcelain, rice, and other products, especially tea.

The story goes that when tea was first introduced in 1638 to an earlier Tsar, Michael I, as a gift from Mongolia, the Russians weren't sure what to do with the strange dead leaves, but they soon learned, and tea quickly became an important part of Russian culture.

It was brought by camel caravan, usually compressed into tea bricks, at first for the nobility, but by the end of the 18th century in such massive amounts everyone was drinking it. Russian tea was considered better quality than tea in other parts of Europe, because it was transported over land rather than in the holds of ships. Samovars, like the one shown on the left side of our picture, were used in Russia to brew a strong concentrate in the kettle on top that could be mixed with hot water from the lower urn, blending it in the cup to suit the taste of the drinker. Today, the Trans-Siberian Railway serves the purpose that the Tea Road once served, stretching from Moscow 9,289 kilometers (5,772 miles) to Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean. Tea is now grown in several Black Sea regions: on the Crimean Peninsula, in the Caucasus region, and along the coast of Turkey from the border with Georgia to Trabzon, where tea grows alongside hazelnut, cherry, and apple trees. The luscious watermelon and other fruit in the 1918 painting by Boris Kustoviev grow well near the Black Sea, too. Yum!

Answer: Caravansarais

Trabzon, once known as Trebizond, is on the Black Sea coast of far northeastern Turkey, and in the Middle Ages was capital of an independent kingdom with ties to nearby Georgia. On some medieval Arab maps, the Black Sea was even labeled "bahr al-Tarabazunda" (the Sea of Trebizond), because the city marked the terminus of one route of the Silk Road.

The Silk Road was not a single highway from one point to another but a complex network of shifting trade routes of at least 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles) from Istanbul (Constantinople) in European Turkey to Xi'an in central China, growing up over several millennia, with additional branches into Europe, Arabia, Africa, India, Japan, and Southeast Asia.

Not only silk but many products and ideas were exchanged by way of these routes, as was the Black Plague. Romans, who first glimpsed silk as Parthian battle flags around 53 B.C., had set up military encampments, and fortifications had been built by successive powers along the way, but it was when the Seljuk Turks gained control of the roads in the 11th century that places of rest were established a day's journey apart (30-40 kilometers), as a charitable service for travelers and a way of insuring safety.

The "caravansary" has various spellings and names; establishments were called "khans" in areas influenced by Persia, while a Greek translation that means "welcoming all" might best fit the intent. The building complex usually had a central courtyard, open to the sky, and roofed stalls and rooms so that animals, goods, and people of all social classes could shelter, typically from one to three nights. Food and water for both humans and animals, places for cleansing and worship, and even shoe repair were provided. The caravansary in our picture, painted in the 19th century, is from Trabzon, but many still stood all along the roads in the 1700s, even though bandits and competing empires like the Safavids in Persia posed dangers and the Silk Roads were becoming less lucrative. Europeans were developing maritime spice routes and seeking new ways around the traditional land routes in Muslim territories. The secrets to silk production and weaving had been spirited away from China and were being practiced closer to home for tradespeople of Europe and the Ottoman Empire, especially in Bursa, Turkey, and in Italy and France, where innovations in weaving were taking place in the 1700s. Imperial Russia was building an alternate route through the far north and pushing for ports in the Sea of Azov and other outposts along the northern reaches, as well as on the Caspian Sea. Still, to a great extent the nickname "Ottoman Lake" applied to the Black Sea. In the 21st century, international groups have created a "Black Sea Silk Road Corridor" that encourages travel across borders along a trail through Greece, Turkey, Georgia, and Armenia, with the motto "Touching Time" reflecting the rich historical heritage of this diverse region at one end of the storied trade route of long ago.

Answer: Constantinople

It's Constantinope, of course, the city of many names, officially called Istanbul since 1930, though the name evolved much earlier. The sketch here is from a map of the Black Sea coast drawn by Timothy Gabashvili himself. The Archbishop had been to cities in European Russia in previous years as a diplomat, getting captured by Cimmerians on his way back home, and in the 1750s was given permission to take a pilgrimage south to Mount Athos, a monastery complex and center of learning on the Aegean Sea to which the royal family of Georgia had donated for centuries. He then sailed back to Constantinople, staying for several months to get safe passage, then traveled on to Jerusalem and other sites in the Holy Land, walking from the coast of Lebanon because his ship was blown off course, thus able to set foot in Nazareth and other places connected to the Bible that pilgrims in the 1700s usually did not get to visit. He went back to Mount Athos, Athens, Corinth, and other Christian sites in Greece on his return. He describes scenes and tells stories of miracles and saints, especially those connected to Georgia. He was impressed with Constantinople, shedding tears on his first visit because the city was no longer Christian but had long been under the rule of the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

Here's more of his description: "The mountains are lavishly covered with spruce trees and Lebanese cypresses. The city has been built on both sides of the sea that flows in a narrow stream. The structure of the walls, the towers and the battlements are splendidly coloured. The windows of the palaces sparkling in different ways, resembled Eden. Some of the palaces, vaults and bazaars of the city were covered with lead, the gilded roofs of the palaces and springs shone like the sun shining on the city, and the colour of other buildings in the city was scorched clay, or purple, a hue also like the sunset. The ships in the city stood erect like the trunks of poplar trees. Among the groves of selvinu, ghaji, and cypress trees, there was a glimpse of the royal palaces, and the buildings were veiled in the forest of pine and spruce groves. This capital seemed to me like the brightest among the stars, like a rose among the flowers of Eden, like a jacinth among the precious emeralds, like the rainbow in the clouds, and Augustus Caeser among the kings. I found it very difficult and sad to be leaving Constantinople, as I, who had come here after a great many sufferings and hardships, would never see it again. My eyes and my mind competed in emotion when viewing this marvelous city." (Timothy Gabashvili, "Pilgrimage to Mount Athos, Constantinople, and Jerusalem 1755-1759", translated by Mzia Ebanoidze and John Wilkinson.)